Other Futures is a multidisciplinary festival and exhibition that presents speculative visions of the future. The visual art exhibition Spectres from Beyond featured Jason Wee (SG),Natasha Tontey (ID), Bie Michels (BE), and new commissions from Mehraneh Atashi (IR/NL) and Müge Yilmaz (TR/NL).
Mehraneh Atashi, Pioneer, 2021.
Mehraneh Atashi, Pioneer, 2021. Amsterdam. Photo: Pieter Kers
Natasha Tontey, The Epoch of Mapalucene
Indigenous Knowledge and Non-Modern Aesthetics
In The Epoch of Mapalucene, Natasha Tontey envisions a speculative future shaped by the Minahasa worldview, where mutual aid and interspecies solidarity define a new geological epoch. Presented as a video installation, the work extends Tontey’s ongoing research into Indigenous Minahasa knowledge and its relevance in imagining alternative futures.
The Minahasa people of North Sulawesi, Indonesia, have long practiced Mapalus, a gift economy rooted in volunteerism, reciprocity, and kinship with nature. In their cosmology, the first human was a woman who gave birth through a stone—an origin story that reflects the deep spiritual and material significance of stones in Minahasa culture. Commissioned by Other Futures Festival, The Epoch of Mapalucene also critiques the Western-centric bias of the Anthropocene—a concept that attributes environmental destruction to humanity as a whole, overlooking the social, political, and historical factors that differentiate colonial and capitalist industrialization from Indigenous economies.
Tontey challenges dominant narratives of progress by centering Minahasa cosmology and embracing a kitschy aesthetic that blends Indonesian soap opera, video game culture, and both digital and real-life subcultures. Bringing together animate and inanimate realms, Tontey suggests that alternative models of co-existence—grounded in care, reciprocity, and non-human agency—have always existed outside the modernist trajectory.
